This takes place in the context of fundamental geo-political shifts in the region that have seen Japan's strategic ties to the United States strengthening as it tries to adjust to the economic rise of China, while Russia and China have been improving their own strategic relationship.

Just as Japan was shocked into drawing closer to the United States by the proof of its own vulnerability when North Korea flight-tested a Taepodong ballistic missile over Tokyo in 1998, so it has been rocked again by the joint Russian-Chinese military exercises in the North Pacific near Vladivostok this summer.

Putin arrives Nov. 20 for talks with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and officials have already agreed on the outlines of what looks like an upbeat joint document on economic, trade and cultural relations, and a joint declaration on future bilateral relations that is full of good intentions and benevolent clich�s.

The harsh reality is Putin has already squashed Japan's main goal in the talks -- an agreement for the return of the Kurils, four islands off the northeastern coast of Hokkaido, occupied by Russia since 1945 as its booty of war.

"The four islands are under Russia's sovereignty. Therefore, there's nothing to argue about," Putin said.

Boris Gryzlov, speaker of the State Duma, Russia's parliament, rammed the message home in an op-ed article that said bluntly that Japan had lost the islands "as punishment for its aggression against neighboring countries."

Japanese officials are shrugging in resignation that the high price of oil and gas has boosted Russia's self-confidence and its assertiveness in international affairs. The Yomiuri Shimbun this week quoted a Japanese foreign ministry official saying: "Soaring crude oil prices have boosted Russia's economy as it exports a lot of oil. Russia is in no hurry to settle the territorial dispute in order to receive financial assistance from Tokyo."

Tokyo's expectations that a more stable Russian government in Putin's second term would feel confident enough to negotiate over the Kuril Islands have been disappointed.

"Our calculations didn't pan out as we hoped. In fact, quite the opposite appears to be happening," the same foreign ministry source told Yomiuri.

Tokyo had been more hopeful of the pipeline to be built to export crude oil from eastern Siberia. There are two possible routes: a direct line to the Pacific coast at Nakhodka that would serve Japan, and a pipeline to booming and energy-hungry China via Daqing. China is pressing strongly for its route and citing the strengthening Sino-Russian strategic friendship, demonstrated in August when China and Russia conducted their first joint military exercise in Vladivostok. Japanese officials are accordingly pessimistic.

"We're trying to persuade Russia that priority should be placed on the Pacific route. But we don't know what will happen," an official of the Natural Resources and Energy Agency told Yomiuri this week.

Japan's concern over China and its gloom over any positive outcome from the Putin visit have given Koizumi a fair wind for his own decision to strengthen the relationship with the American ally. Koizumi has for the first time since World War II deployed Japanese troops in logistic and peacekeeping roles in direct support of the U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has also stepped up technological cooperation on the U.S. anti-missile defense programs, along with financial support.

The Japanese have been following almost as a blueprint the recommendations of the report written in 2000 by Richard Armitage, later deputy Secretary of State in the first Bush administration, which urged the transformation of the Japan-U.S. alliance into a much closer relationship similar to the Anglo-American alliance. The key to this, Armitage argued, was for Japan to become a full military ally by acknowledging that it is capable of exercising the right of collective self-defense.

This meant amending the pacifist clauses of the Japanese constitution, as drafted by Gen. Douglas Macarthur during the postwar occupation of Japan. Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party this July announced an outline of constitutional amendments, calling for scrapping Article 9, Clause 2 which bars Japan from possessing armed forces. (The amendment would have to pass a national referendum.) This national debate, which is likely to be heated and acrimonious, will be under way during Putin's visit, and its implications will be clear to the Russian leader -- Japan is preparing to be a leading military power again, but for the foreseeable future as an ally of the Americans, rather than as a self-standing great power in Asia.

Japanese officials and foreign policy experts like to echo the Armitage report by stressing that any improvements in Japan's military capability should be seem as a Pacific Ocean version of the close U.S. alliance with Britain.

"Japan is an island nation. As long as Japan is allied with the Anglo-American world that dominates the oceans of the world, Japan can enjoy national security," argues Ambassador Hisahiko Okazaki in a recent essay written during a fellowship at the Yomiuri Research Institute. Okazaki also served as Japanese ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Thailand.

"It may be best for the United States to maintain a firm alliance with Britain across the Atlantic Ocean and with Japan across the Pacific, while dealing with continental powers through a policy similar to that employed by Britain to ensure a balance of power in the 19th century. The past 100 years attest to the validity of this," Okazaki writes. "If this materializes, peace will certainly be guaranteed in Asia, and the entire world, for a number of decades to come and possibly throughout the 21st century."

Okazaki, a respected figure and a leading member of the Japanese foreign policy establishment, is not starry-eyed about the American alliance. He notes that "no definite answers have yet been given when it comes to the question of whether this country can place its destiny in the hands of the Japan-U.S. alliance in the distant future."

The problem is, he points out, "How much value does the Japan-U.S. alliance have in the eyes of the United States? It is possible indeed the United States, the sole superpower, might be able to ensure its own security, prosperity and freedom in the absence of the alliance with any country, including Japan. To be sure, Japan, from a cool-headed, geopolitical point of view, is useful to the United States as a fortress, or at least as a buffer, against Russia and China, which -- through temporarily pulling back from the center stage of international politics in the Far East due to their revolutions at the outset of the 20th century -- are potentially more formidable continental powers than Japan."

In short, the Japanese may be making a fundamental strategic shift, but they are not altogether convinced that they should commit all their eggs to a possibly unreliable American basket. But with China still actively resenting Japan's role in the decades before 1945, and the Russians refusing to reconsider the status of the Kurils, Tokyo is unhappily aware it inhabits an unstable neighborhood and has very few options than to cling to the American alliance.

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